Short story writing and creative fiction, essays and non-fiction stories.

Dog Days and Starlit Nights By Angie J. Mayfield

It was love at first sight. He was ambling alongside the road with a McDonald’s French fry box in his mouth, and something about those big sorrowful eyes, copper brown and pleading, tugged at my heart, and the steering wheel, forcing me to pull over and offer him a ride.

The scene was straight from a chic flick movie. I called out. He turned. He dropped the box and ran to me, his tongue outstretched, his tail wagging, rushing into my arms and delivering a big, slobbery kiss right on the lips. I was his heroine, his savior, and he gladly jumped into the truck and sat beside me as though we were destined to be together.

The stretch of road south of my home is flat and desolate, with acres of sandy fields running along White River. The area is a common dump site for the unwanted, and judging by the visible outline of his ribcage and sunken eyes, my new pet had seen better days. Raised around coon dogs, I knew the gangly creature to be a blue tick hound, probably about four or five months old. Bluish-black in color, with white spots, or ticking, spread over his body, he is an animated replica of one of my youngest son’s splotchy artworks hanging on the refrigerator. One ear and eye are completely black, giving him a half pirate, half Little Rascals comical appearance that makes him even more pitiful and endearing.
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Build a Memory. Build a Bear. by Bryan Currie

There’s a copper-toned Queen in New York Harbor who, until recently, happily greeted visitors to the shores of our promised land. She now sits on Ellis Island politely checking green cards and work visas, reminding the huddled masses to wipe their feet on the way in, worried they might stay too long.

One of my roommates, Eimear, arrived in America three weeks ago from Ireland. She didn’t arrive by boat and has yet to visit Lady Liberty. In fact, Eimear isn’t even planning to say long, but would like to work while she’s here.

In order to work in the United Sates, however, non-citizens need three things:

1. Valid identification
2. Work visa
3. United States social security number

Even though she has an appropriate passport and visa, Eimear is having as difficult a time being issued a social security card as many of us will have collecting social security benefits.

This is especially unfortunate because Eimear might have found a job at the Build-A-Bear Workshop, a toy store where children design and construct their own stuffed bears. Build-A-Bear is the salad bar of toy stores, and as soon as she’s issued a social security number, Eimear will begin walking children through their bear buffet in Times Square.

(Times Square is an exciting chaos of light and sound where most tourists take their first bite from the Big Apple. Like the strip in Las Vegas, the French Quarter in New Orleans, and the McDonalds in Montana, Times Square is the social center of our city. Sinatra once sang that “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” The same holds true for a child wanting to build a bear at the Build-A-Bear Workshop in Times Square. Can he/she make one there? Yes. With over 200 locations in malls nationwide, can he/she also make one anywhere? Same answer. Yes.)

After completing all the necessary paperwork, Eimear arrived at the Build-A-Bear Workshop at 10:45, fifteen minutes before her scheduled 11:00 interview. Eimear didn’t realize, however, that you don’t interview to work at the Build-A-Bear Workshop, you audition. This audition is held for a group of twenty candidates andincludes, but is not limited to:

• An oral recitation of the Build-A-Bear pledge, from memory.
• An improvised group presentation entitled: “Build a memory. Build a Bear.”
• A personal testimony covering “my definition of teamwork,” “a time when I touched someone’s life,” and “what makes me special.”
• A 150 question ethics exam meant to evaluate whether or not the potential bear builder might one day qualify for relocation to Santa’s Workshop.

One applicant was so overcome by her own “a time when I touched someone’s life” story that, weeping, she had to be escorted from the room. Perhaps behind closed doors the interviewer told the girl that the Build-A-Bear Workshop would probably be too emotionally demanding an environment for someone with her sensitive temperament.

Or, she might have immediately been named employee of the month.

Eimear wasn’t as fortunate. After the three hour audition / interview, Eimear arrived at our apartment emotionally exhausted.

“How did it go,” I asked.

“I didn’t offer to work for free like the crying girl did, but I think it went quite well.”

“The crying girl? What crying girl?”

“The one who told a story about how she touched someone’s life by shaving her head because her friend went bald. I don’t know. I was fighting a wicked hangover and was having quite a hard time paying attention through her blubbering.”

“You interviewed at a toy store with a hangover?!”

Despite her condition at the interview (and after two subsequent call-backs), Eimear was offered a job at the Build-A-Bear Workshop – and she should have been. Even at her worst, Eimear is magnificent.

Even Eimear, however, doesn’t deny the irony of her own story.

Arriving hung-over at a Build-A-Bear interview is like showing up pregnant for a Snow White audition. The same rules apply.

In a world where image is everything, smile. It’s what’s on the outside that counts.

You can read more of Bryan’s work on his blog, sometimesroadsdiverge.blogspot.com

Posted in Non-Fiction | 6 Comments »

Bipolar, Lithium, Suicide and The Lost Years of My Life by Jason D. Hill

When things are illuminated, life is beautiful. Luminosity is, indeed, a wonderful thing. You are anchored in your body and that body is easy to please. You only have to honor the integrity of your senses. The bad smells bad, and the good is to be luxuriated in. You feel your senses acutely and realize you were blessed with them because they make you into a deep participant in life. Others have their senses too and you share yours with them. Social intercourse is your way into earthly heaven.

You are not alone.

Life belongs to you. Life can be shaped according to your vision and by the grace of its better possibilities. You love life and intend to affirm it by being a co-author in the shaping of a destiny you have faith in: it can only be for your good.
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On the Way Down by Gabriel L. Nathan

Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong. My paternal grandmother’s name was Nava, which, in Hebrew, translates to “beautiful.” In the biblical Song of Songs, it says, “Thou art beautiful [nava], O my love, as Tirzah, beautiful [nava] as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.” By the time I met my Nava, she wasn’t quite beautiful, or terrible. She was essentially a shriveled up little raisin in a modest, tweed skirt and thirty-five-year-old glasses. She was certainly sweet and cute, and raisiny, but I’m not sure she was beautiful. I suppose at one time she was—her husband certainly thought so anyway.
One day my father and I were talking about names, for some reason, children’s names; what you name your children. I asked him if, when my mother was pregnant with me, he’d ever brought up the idea with her about naming me after his own father. He exploded at me.

“Gabriel! What are you, fuckin’ stupid?!” he asked, rhetorically, I hope.

“Well, Dad, I mean, you…” I began.

“Look Gabriel; having a child is a huge responsibility, okay? You can really fuck a kid up right from the beginning if you call him the wrong thing,” my father explained to me. I protested.

“The ‘wrong thing?’ Dad, you know, he was your father.”

“So?” he frothed. “He’s still my father, and you are my son, and it’s a terrible name so why would I do it to you? MoRAD?” he roared, punching out the last syllable each time like a veteran heavyweight. “You think I wanted to name you MoRAD?! Next you’ll say I should have named you after me. Efraim,” he said contemptuously of his own identity. “Another fuckin’ retard name!”

My father, finished for the time being, got up from the dining room table, randomly announced that he was going to “The Camera Shop” and left.

I didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. His bombastic, Israeli rants are a product of the desert from which he came, and are just meant to be endured and accepted. He blows up all the time, like a rear-ended Pinto, but locating the catalyst usually proves a superhuman investigative feat. I didn’t figure this one out for a while.
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Vacations Spent Searching by Matt Landau

It was reasonably late in my life that I discovered there was a name for my fear of crowded places. And more specifically, the term agoraphobia, upon stumbling over it recently in my Spanish-English dictionary, gave validity to what my family had always considered a silly and embarrassingly illogical concern.

Agoraphobia- Fear of crowded, public places like markets (or in my case, beaches).

I was fortunate enough as a child to entertain wild and dreamy ideas when it came to planning holiday vacations. When asked where this year’s Christmas break should be spent with my brother and parents, I’d regularly contemplate the most recent grand prize Bob Barker had given away on The Price Is Right. “How about a relaxing tropical escape to luxurious Graaaaand Cayman?” I’d say, using a cheesy, almost salesy intonation to my voice. Usually no one listened.

Holiday breaks allowed us to see new places and experience new things; a sense of novelty that inspired us to let down our guard and, as a country singer might put it, try ‘n live a little. Honey coated cereals, for example, not permitted otherwise in our home, were allowed in the mornings of vacations via small cardboard packages that limited our Fruit Loop or Apple Jack consumption to a muted sugar high. We rented convertible jeeps that we wouldn’t be caught dead driving in the States, for their poor safety ratings and we stayed in houses with pools (a huge insurance liability back at home). We went out to exceedingly expensive restaurants that would normally be the butt of our jokes and we wore polo shirts and flower prints that were about as unnatural as the suntans we displayed on our legs and necks.

Even as a young child, I enjoyed, in a sophisticated sort of way, using this deviant theme of doing things outside the box, to safeguard my fears. I never liked crowded beaches though I can’t really say why.
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